This is the Punjabi poet IqbalRamoowalia’s first novel in English. As a
Punjabi-Canadian male author’s woman-centric work in English, it is arguably a
pioneering and signal achievement. Moreover, it is a contemporary social
document that records an illegal Punjabi immigrant woman’s travails in Canada.

The novel has a gripping narrative that compels you to
read it through in one or two sittings. But the fact that you can so
effortlessly manage to read it indicates also its main weakness: it fails to
hold you back and make you muse, and it fails to linger in the memory. For one
thing, the language lacks felicity. The author gives the impression of walking
the tightrope between composition and creative expression. Secondly, the
narrative sequencing could have endured more ruthless editing.

As a social document, the novel should, of course, serve
as a potent dream-killer, for what Ramoowalia puts
together is almost a diasporic dystopia in which
there are no heroes but only monstrous villains. And they all are Punjabis. It
is a curiously empty but claustrophobic world, an ‘under-world’ of immigrant
sub-human Punjabis under siege of an invisible ‘white’ world of exploitation
and law. What is probably a failure in terms of fictional art (the failure to
realize the spatial world of Toronto, Vancouver or
Ludhiana) comes out, in effect, as a sinister, looming absence, closing
in all the time on the “basement” world of the poor Seema,
the novel’s protagonist.

The inner world of the characters is even emptier. The
only insight we are given into it is provided in Seema’s
case and that too in the form of whispered thinking. In fact, the grip of the
stereotype is, for Ramoowalia, difficult to shake
off. Even Seema teeters perilously on the edge of
the stereotype: she is the eternally cold woman, suffering from pathological
frigidity born out of a failed romance and unable to emerge from her teenager
mindset in spite of many harrowing experiences. Her friend
Veena, whose husband tries to rape her, is
portrayed as an impossibly unintelligent woman who cannot guess the reason of
her friend’s uncontrollable tears, silence and sudden departure. Patricia,
the only important non-Punjabi character in the novel, is a “green-eyed”
racial stereotype of the fair and compassionate white woman. And she is
suitably deviant too: she is the perpetrator of a lesbian “rape” on
Seema.

In addition to the lesbian “rape”, there are three
heterosexual rape attempts on Seema. It is quite
intriguing that all these are made by Punjabi men (one of them is a
Gurdwara priest) and none is consummated. If it is
a device to save the heroine from dishonour and
the men from damnation, it is a rather improbable device. The author, it
seems, would have his cake and eat it too: he must show the men as rapists and
yet not as rapists enough. But he surely succeeds in showing the typical
rapist as a cowardly and sick man. This is most evident in his treatment of
the priest; unfortunately, though, the episode is artistically ruined by crude
melodramatic symbolism that seems to exist for no reason other than the urge
to shock the Punjabi sensibility. Perhaps Ramoowalia
intended to shatter the stereotype of the Punjabi man as kindly, generous and
protective but he has ended up replacing it with another stereotype: that of
the ruthless exploiter, frustrated alcoholic and failed lecher.

Given their peculiar situation as lurkers and drifters,
the suffering of the illegal immigrants from Punjab needs to be understood
against the backdrop of the amoral universe of global corporatism and
transcontinental migrations of desperate populations in search of work. The
novel, however, tries to transpose the burden of guilt on to the shoulders of
a crudely sketched and ghostly patriarchy, with the result that the scale of
human suffering is diminished. In the event, the author also misses the
opportunity to surgically rip open the insides of Punjab’s political economy
that compels people to take a plunge into the abyss. The Greeks imagined the
gods into existence and enabled their men and women to become more nobly and
quintessentially human by contending with them. By imagining the gods of the
new world economic order out of existence, one not only fails to situate the
suffering of people in our times but also risks dehumanizing the people who
suffer. In Ramoowalia’s novel, for example, the
rampant dehumanization does not spare even Seema
who becomes the efficient cause of Sodhi’s
suicide. It is she who impairs his mind by a secret daily overdose of liquor,
because she wants him to be just as much and as long
alive as suits her purpose. The desire, and compulsion, to get the status of a
legal immigrant brutalizes her utterly and makes her a killer. The
brutalization is externalized in her self-quarrel in which she asks herself
whether her exploiter-protector Sodhi is not
really a mere “passport” for her. Indeed, the title of the novel derives from
this dark illumination.

Ironically, however, the title also symbolically
displaces Seema from her centrality to the
narrative by putting Sodhi, as the “passport”, in
her place. Perhaps it is the patriarchal unconscious trying to recuperate a
woman-centric novel in a last-ditch effort?